Re: ConTeXt output & commercial printing houses: Thanks!

[Tobias Hilbricht <hilbricht@linopus.de>]

Am Di, den 27.07.2004 schrieb Matt Gushee um 08:15:
>  they think that PDF
> means "Adobe PDF"--i.e. they believe that Adobe software is *the* way to
> produce PDF, and are mostly unaware that there is such a thing as a PDF
> standard. Now, I don't fully understand the issue, but apparently Adobe
> software doesn't entirely follow the published specs, whereas TeX does.
> And some processing software seems to be designed specifically to work
> with the quirks of Acrobat output, and sometimes has trouble with PDFTeX
> output.

This is also true if you want to publish advertisements in journals -
the journals/newspapers often require PDF prepared by Adobe Acrobat /
Distiller. If you provide advertisements prepared by other means then it
is your fault if something goes wrong. This is despite the PDF/X3
standard for preprint ready PDF documents. For this reason the claim of
some commercial TeX-vendors to produce PDF which comes closer to the
"quirks of Acrobat output" is not worth so much in practice.
 
However, when you  prepare documents for print regularly, then it is
anyway best to have "your own" printer locally at hand - somebody you
can trust and who wants to keep you as a customer. Then you can deal
with problems arising and talk about solutions directly.

So far I did not encounter problems with PDFs made by PDFTeX, but then I
gave only documents to print in black and white or with colours where it
does not matter if the red or blue is slightly brighter or darker. I
dont know about printing-experiences of PDFTeX-prepared documents with
colour separation, spot colours, trapping ... in conjunction with
various media (glossy/matte paper ...) where it becomes more difficult.

Yours sincerely

Tobias Hilbricht